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Topic: Artifact minmaxing (Read 3977 times)

(Just to be clear, my original post about eliminating alts / specs was a joke -- don't want anyone to think I genuinely think that's the solution to these sorts of "progression and catch up mechanic" problems.)

The lore on the artifacts is great and the legendaries are well fleshed out. Love the changes from the point of view of my main, but I really miss the flexibility to be able to swap from shadow to healing to help a raid. Now, maybe staying with DISCO might have been best, since priests do have an 80% healer / 80% DPS spec, but I was worried i would have to be 20 traits in before I knew how I was going to perform.

I guess the bottom line for me is that it has removed the experimentation: I have to commit early, and shovel AP hard to stay to get all the traits that matter. I'm working on the last *actual healing* trait right now, and after that it's going to be an uphill battle for silly things before my 5% bonuses. At that point I may consider fleshing out the alt specs --- I mean, one trait for holy is going to take me half way around the world for discipline at that point....

Some of this is perception over reality. I think someone made an infographic around launch time showing how many main-spec traits behind you would be if you put some percentage of your AP in an offspec, and it's not nearly as much as you'd think (like, usually just 1, I think). But the reality doesn't matter if the perception is causing people not to invest in their offspec artifacts; they still won't be ready to perform in an offspec role when it's wanted.

Have there been games where boss fights are normalized (not sure if that's the right word) to a set number of attackers? So if you bring 12 or 13 people, you get 3 or 2 NPCs to help you out. The trick is making an algorithm where they do (say) 95% DPS of what a PC could do. So then the raid has to decide if it's worth having healers healing the NPCs or letting the NPCs die and instead have another PC DPS.

Well, if you want to be able to tank, heal, or DPS on every character and have only one toon-that's FFXIV for ya!

I agree with Marco that this is perception vs. reality-but it's so hard to fight that perception. If your OS artifact is only 1 trait behind your MS one, but you are 1or a fraction fewer traits behind where you COULD be if you'd spent all that AP on your MS artifact, you feel like you're holding your raid back. Logically one non-golden trait isn't enough to really hold you back, but the idea is still there in the back of your mind.

That's why my OS artifact is at like 14 traits-I also get that feeling.

That's why I mentioned a sociologist or psychologist on staff. Perception is extremely important and someone on hand to say "Yes, I know the numbers say this, but here is how people will respond to this mechanic because people act on feelings, not just logic"

Or at least paint the numbers in a better way to help improve that perception.

If some studios aren't doing this, I see it as a near'ish future thing.

I think for me it's also that I started the expansion late, so every point I put in the "wrong" artifact (even though I'm playing moonkin and resto about the same amount) just feels like I'm putting myself even further behind. I mean, I'm still looking forward to AK 10.

The latest 7.1.5 PTR build has some new artifact knowledge catch-up mechanics which appear a bit more aggressive than developers had discussed in Q+As and interviews. Based on comments:

* You can instantly buy up to AK 15 at the usual 500 order resources per AK level, and then start work orders. Previously they only talked about doing this up to AK 10.

* You can buy a catch-up book for an alt by spending order resources on your main. It looks like there are books for AK levels 10, 15, and 20. One commenter said that at AK level 18 he could only buy the AK 10 book for 1000 order resources, suggesting that you need to be five AK above the book level to buy a book. So to buy the AK 20 book, you'd have to get up to AK 25.

Last week I finished getting my last healing related trait for holy. There are about 5 more traits before the +5% traits, and I'm at the 400k per level right now, so there is going to be minimal gain for my main spec for a LOOOONG time. So I pushed 100k into my disco weapon. What a difference: I went from nothing to basically a viable second spec in a couple of days. Two goldens and most of the good ones, and my last one only cost 65k.

I'm still weak for actual iLvl in my alt weapons, but the curve on traits makes it so that you can basically just backfill your other weapons from world quests without feeling it on your main. Hopefully I'll be able to smite my way through some farm content soon!

I'll go with the guess I saw on wowhead weekly which is "early January." We're getting close to holiday vacation time, which means limited staff availability to fix the inevitable patch bugs. The patch also doesn't seem especially ready on the PTR, with Blizzard still iterating on class design and saying they haven't done numbers tuning.

The first new mini-holiday is January 21. That isn't necessarily a hard deadline, but I imagine they don't want us to wait a year for it.

(The Nighthold raid is also expected in January. It is completely decoupled from patch 7.1.5.)

[ETA: in the December 7 developer Q+A, Ion confirmed that 7.1.5 won't release before the holidays, and implied that they are aiming for shortly after the holidays.]

The 35th artifact trait you buy gives you a significant bonus like +5% damage, but the even more expensive upgrades to that trait give more marginal bonuses like 0.5% damage. Knowing that Blizzard plans to add new traits in patch 7.2, and not knowing the details, it can be tempting to hoard AP after your 35th trait, in hopes of spending it later on traits which are more valuable than ranks of the current final trait.

In today's developer Q+A, we were assured that this is not a useful strategy. Any points you put into your final trait will benefit you (details to be determined) as much as if you had hoarded them and spent them after the patch, so hoarding points does nothing besides deny you short-term power.

(The 35th point does remain a good place to start investing in offspecs, although of course any such investments will not benefit your main spec in patch 7.2. But new ranks of artifact knowledge will render those points less relevant as time goes on.)

Here's a question about artifacts for which no answer may be known for many months: Will our artifacts weapons continue into 8.x? Or will they be replaced by something else?

Why is may be relevant now: I'm planning to take a couple of alts to level 105 and leave them there, grinding for order hall pets. But in 8.x I might want to play them again. I could level them up to 110 quickly enough in the couple of months running up to the 8.x release, but would I bitterly regret not accumulating enough AP to get their weapons up to the 35th trait by 8.x? If the latter, I might be inclined to grind those alts occasionally so they would not be terminally far behind or require me to boost them to 110 (assuming 8.x will give us the now-usual level boost option).